


Who Plays The Fool

by sage_theory (papersage)



Category: The Tomorrow People (1992)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-07
Updated: 2010-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:16:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papersage/pseuds/sage_theory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe it's miracles or maybe it's just simple repairs</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Plays The Fool

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the SDMI contest challenge requiring the mention or showing of a rubber band, a bucket, and the use of the quote: _There's a light shining in the dark, leading me on towards a change of heart_

Lisa is draped over on of the low supports of the spaceship, like some kind of lazy feline predator. She looks down at Megabyte who's on his back fixing something underneath a panel.

Adam and Ami, they like to think the spaceship runs like a swiss watch, that it's some magic illusion when really all the time it's Megabyte and his bucket of tools keeping it all together.

"It's really amazing don't you think?" Lisa asks, letting her arm drop over the side.

 

"What's amazing?" Megabyte asks, blindly fumbling for some tool in the square bucket beside him.

 

"That you're repairing the spaceship like this," Lisa tells him. "The ship is a living being, so really, you're doing surgery. It must be incredibly complicated."

"Nah, not really," he tells Lisa, and grunts.

"Yes, *really*. God, Megabyte, how did you ever learn all of this? Sure, doctors are smart, but this isn't just a human body. This is a piece of technology that our entire civilization is hundreds of years away from understanding, much less being capable of. And here you are, just repairing it. It's like a miracle."

 

"It's really not all that dramatic, I promise," Megabyte reassures her. "I think what you do is more complicated."

 

"You mean the law?"

 

"Yeah. You have all this knowledge and you can take words and make them mean whatever you need. *That's* a miracle."

 

Lisa fishes a rubber band out of her pocket, puts her hair up quickly and lays her cheek back down on the cool stone-metal of the spaceship.

 

"Yeah, until good people start getting hurt."

 

"Maybe," Megabyte answers, putting a tool back and retrieving another.

 

Lisa closes her eye slowly and asks, "What's the ship made of? I mean, I've been laying here for a while, and there's no warm spot."

 

Megabyte makes a sound which is a vocal shrug, but more than that, Lisa can feel the soft ripple of his thoughts brushing the edge of her drifting attention.

 

"The best I can tell is that it's a weird alloy that the ship can deliberately alter the conductive and insulating properties of. Sort of like some kind of instantaneous cellular-level temperature control. I don't know, I'm not a metallurgist."

 

"Makes me want to kick you."

 

"The ship makes you want to kick me?" he asks, sliding out from under the panel and staring up at her. Lisa smiles softly with her chin on the ledge.

 

"No. *That*. You spend so much time trying to cover up just how smart you are."

 

"Or maybe I'm just good at making you think I'm smart," he says, smiling up at her and snorting. He lays back down and slides under the panel.

 

"I'm one of the few people on the planet you can't tell that lie to, Megabyte. Why do you do that? You even try to convince yourself you're not smart."

 

"Okay, I'm no idiot. But --"

 

"But you're not Adam or Jade, is that what you were going to say? They're just *so* amazing, with their Ph.D's and their big words and all their analysis of people's heads. I bet you they don't even know how many times you've done repairs on the ship." The sarcasm in Lisa's voice is more about Megabyte than Adam and Jade. Like he's participating in their ignorance by not telling them that in fact the spaceship needs more repairs than they could possibly imagine.

 

Megabyte knows this, and he really wants to end the conversation so he says, "Yeah, well. It takes a genius to do the stuff they do or what you do. Think about it, Lisa. Maybe you think you just help the bad guys get out of jail, but you're doing a bigger job than that. Because when the government comes after innocent people, you're there, and you can say the magic words. You can stop them with *words*. No violence, no blood. Just your words. And you use that to make their lives better. You can't tell me it isn't a *miracle* to set someone free."

 

"See, there you go again. Pretending that what you do and what you know is nothing. What I do, it doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, nothing is done. But you work *your* miracle, Megabyte, and something is fixed, something works."

 

"And at the end of your day, the law works. That isn't nothing," Megabyte argues, grunting frustratedly and laying a tool on his stomach.

 

"Yeah, that's us. We're just repairmen, fixing things that nobody around us even understands," Lisa says.

 

"Yeah. Repairmen of the world unite," Megabyte murmurs, scooting a little further back. "Ah-ha!"

 

"It doesn't bother you that they don't know how much work you put into the spaceship."

 

"Why? I don't do it because I want something. I do it because it needs doing. Simple as that."

 

Lisa realizes at this point that Megabyte can no more accept her forceful praise anymore than she could accept his. So she just smiles and tells him, for no good reason, "I feel really sleepy."

 

"You could stay there, if you fell asleep, the ship will keep you warm," Megabyte tells her. "Conductive alloys and all that."

 

So Lisa lays her cheek down and lets her eyes open and close at lazy infrequent intervals.

 

"There's a light shining in the dark, leading me on towards a change of heart,"she murmurs, softly a slight lilt in her voice like a tune, and a little rhythm in her words.

 

"What?"

 

"Just some song in my head," Lisa says, and plays it inside her mind. She can feel Megabyte listening. She can feel Megabyte understanding.

 

It's a soft warm little thought in her head that maybe everything is a miracle and they just don't know it yet.

 

She sleeps.

 

Megabyte keeps on humming and working quietly.

 

\- END -


End file.
